zlacker

Silly take: humans are really bad at controlling themselves and stick to doing the correct things, that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values, among many other additional checks/guardrails that didn't exist or weren't common in older languages. It is just easier to have the compiler checks these things for you instead of manually making sure things are correct. Same for sports gambling. Human nature is really bad, and it is really hard to control yourself. See that wsj reporting. Even someone as rich and educated as a psychiatrist can sink 6 digit amount of money into gambling. When the law allowed gambling, especially online gambling, it opened a can of worms.

>>rty32+(OP)
If human nature is truly that inherently bad and dangerous, then the worst possible thing we could do is to allow adult human beings to rule over other adult human beings as their parent, using the threat of violence to prevent them from doing things “for their own good”.

Indeed, allowing this to occur has wrought orders of magnitude more death and destruction than sports gambling or drug use or prostitution.

no victim == no crime

>>sneak+i
If I understand your comment correctly, you are saying laws are bad, and decriminalization/deregulation is good

I would very much like to believe that. But see what happened in Oregon after decriminalizing drugs.

>>rty32+(OP)
This is not so much than human are "really bad" at this. Here they're facing other human (scientists, psychologists, artists, marketers), computers, algorithms, spending all their waking hours devising scheme to make them addicted.

The C language may not help you much with clean memory allocation, but at least they are not using A/B testing and emotional appeal to coerce you into doing deadly memory management.

>>rty32+s3
Look what happened in Mexico and California and many other places after criminalizing them.

They are not the same thing. One causes huge amounts of murder and violence, and the other is simply people destroying their own selves, as is their right.

Almost all of the gun crime in the US is the direct result of the prohibitions on the sale and manufacture of drugs.

>>sneak+i
I used to think this, but do you really see the liberalization of gambling laws as having a positive effect? Would you describe the previous state of it being illegal as some kind of dystopia? Do you care at all about the wreckage it creates in the lives of individuals and their families?

>>rty32+(OP)
Sorry for the nitpick but I'm curious if I'm off here:

> that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values

Go doesn't require you check return values though, no? I can get a return of type (*Model, error) and just completely ignore the error portion of it and never check it. Rust doesn't let you access the value until you deal with the Result/Option wrapper, requiring that you at least acknowledge the potential for an error.

>>snapca+1o
I think laws should be viewed from the lens of human rights and the idea of what might be an actual justifiable application of violence, and not a naive “positive effect”.

It would have a positive effect if I went around summarily executing everyone accused of child exploitation, for example, but it would be insane and unjust. There’s a reason we don’t do it that way.

Threatening people with violence for what other people view as misapplication of their own resources is incredibly unjust.

If you don’t have the freedom to destroy yourself or your own resources, you don’t have freedom.

It isn’t the legal system that causes this wreckage (although you might disagree, “lifting” a ban isn’t an action - it’s cessation of the threat of future enforcement action), and it isn’t the legal system that is the appropriate solution to the problem. All bans are, practically, are the threat of someone pulling out a gun to force you to stop. If you personally aren’t willing to go to that length, you shouldn’t vote for or support such policies.

Are you willing to pull a gun on an addict to stop them from indulging in their addiction? If not, what possible moral justification do you have for instructing a cop to do same?

>>jjice+no
The language doesn't force it but some common tooling does. They probably are using something like staticcheck in their setup and conflating it with the core language.

>>sneak+yo
If stats showed that instances of gambling related social ills increased massively after liberalization would that impact you at all? is your ideology truly consequence-free?

edit: Also yes, I would use physical violence to stop someone I cared about from destroying their lives with gambling if it would help. I would hope for the sake of your loved ones you would be willing to do the same

>>sneak+yo
I do not have to be willing to take out a gun for the ban, and neither does a cop. Cessation of easy online gambling would be enough for some high proportion of the problem. All that takes is the court shutting the company down and serving a cease and desist to their website. You may claim this requires a gun but as far as I know that's never been the case.

>>_dark_+dH
The only reason that a ban like that works is because there is the threat of a gun. You can pretend that it doesn’t require a gun but that’s what the ban is: threat of arrest if you don’t comply.

It does require the gun, but it doesn’t require that the gun get pulled out, because everyone knows the police WILL do so if you resist them. It’s implicit. The cop does have to be ready and willing to do so (contrary to your claim), or everyone would ignore the ban, as it would have no teeth.

People don’t obey laws that are inconvenient to them because of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because the police will draw down on them and force them if push comes to shove.

>>jjice+no
You can ignore it but the compiler will force you to assign it to something, usually `_`. That alone is helpful in reminding the programmer that return values need to thought of, but in addition you have pretty much all Go linters/analyzers force you to check its value and not use `_`.